> Rule 1: If you're going to do crimes, don't put them in writing.
> Rule 2: If you're going to put them in writing, don't write them in "I CAN HAZ CHEEZEBURGER" style writing, it's embarrassing.
> according to Lim, Binance purposely engaged a compliance auditor that would "just do a half assed individual sub audit on geo[fencing]" to "buy us more time." As part of this audit, the Binance employee who held the title of Money Laundering Reporting Officer ("MLRO") lamented that she "need[ed] to write a fake annual MLRO report to Binance board of directors wtf." [1]
By the time you write "fake annual MLRO report" in text, you're about to be a one-person retirement plan for some attorneys.
[1] https://twitter.com/web3isgreat/status/1640378422483472386
How does the simple act of typing that out in a message not trigger the slightest moment of pause, self reflection and, perhaps, self preservation? Good lord.
the other thread about people using ChatGPT with their company's confidential data has some people with their behind hanging out defending it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35330438
Yes, US law might say there is, and might make compelling moral arguments. And yes maybe these laws are in the interest of US voters, or a majority of people in the world. But there's no structurally legitimate democratic mechanism currently in place to make any decision about that. (The UN is not this.) Democracy is what gives laws moral legitimacy, and democracy ends at the border.
So at no point have CZ, Lim, or others here (AFAIK) taken on any commitment to follow US law. Morally, they are completely morally free to think US law is wrong and ignore it, just as I'm completely free to think a law in another country (China or Iran) or another US state (say, Mississippi, or Utah) is wrong and ignore it.
It seems that they're scared of US law, which is rational, and maybe it would be more rational of them to be more scared, but that's another question.
That's not morality, it's just power and violence.
Hamas is a great example. Right now the Western world is cheering and arming a country as it fights off a brutal occupying force with a shady territorial claim. That country published crypto addresses so that everyone in the world could help them buy drones and rocket launchers so they could maim and kill the occupiers and drive them out. I donated and I would encourage you to donate too. I spent most of 2022 watching videos on Reddit, Twitter, and Youtube of young occupiers getting killed and maimed by the drones and rocket launchers I helped buy, as an American taxpayer and as a donor. And I think this was the right thing to do, and I'm proud of it. But I'd certainly understand if someone was a bit ambivalent about this whole thing, thought it was kind of f'ed up, and didn't want to be involved.
Is it so hard to believe that some people in the world feel that Hamas is similarly worthy of support? I don't, but certainly a ton of Palestinians do; they sometimes vote Hamas into a parliamentary majority, and Hamas does very well in polls it seems. And if so, then is it so hard to believe that some people in the world are ambivalent about Hamas and talk about it flippantly in internal Slacks, even when they're afraid of US regulators?
Generally pluralism in the world is served by a diversity of opinions and legal systems. In some cases, like the Ukraine invasion, it will definitely be right to project power outside our borders and legal system. But the default should be to allow for the possibility that we're wrong and avoid imposing the conclusions of our own democratic process on those who did not participate in it.
Maybe US law is wrong about financial freedom and someday we'll look back on this period of zero financial privacy as backward and embarrassingly arbitrary.
For this statement to be true, you have to modify it to "in a pre-Internet world" or "providing financial services."
Hacker News is providing an information and communication service in almost 200 countries where it has not set up a legal entity. You can say financial services are special, and the US does. Some countries like China say that information services are special, that people shouldn't be allowed to criticize the CCP, and enforce that however they have the power to. But the world would be demonstrably worse if we said "every website in the world that is accessible to Chinese citizens living in China should follow CCP censorship laws."
Maybe the world is also worse off for the US's assertion that financial services are a special kind of website that the US can regulate globally simply because some Americans visit them.
At the very least, the rest of the world should have some say on a policy that affects what kind of online businesses they can run. But of course there's no mechanism for them to, since only US citizens can direct US policy.
Also, think about how impossible it would be to run a website if all countries enforced their local laws on all websites, simply because some of their citizens use foreign websites. The US is doing something that it would be unworkable for all countries to do, simply because it's the most powerful country. That alone should be a hint that it's a morally and politically questionable and based on raw power, not fairness; a fair policy would universalize better across countries.
Fairness isn't the concern here. It's just a display of power and law enforcement reach. The Chinese government can (and likely will) block your website if it's criticizing the CCP and gets considerably popular, regardless of the morality of that action.
The same applies to the U.S. government. "To sell derivatives trading products to our citizens, you must register with us first". I consider the American law even fair because derivatives products are risky and a major avenue for scamming people...only licensed firms should offer them.
Note that Binance wasn't banned from selling derivatives products. All that was required was a simple registration with the CFTC, which they refused.
Binance used IP-based locking mechanism (easy to avoid with a VPN). Similarly, I saw US-based websites that blocked access to European customers because of GDPR, and I've circumvented their geolocks using a VPN. Does it mean that I can sue them for not following GDPR now?
I'm not trying to argue for Binance here, and I think that US compliance and anti-money laundering laws are reasonable. But I wonder if your position is that "everyone should just follow US law", or is it more nuanced.
Yes, it does, and most especially if it involves moving funds. If your country decides that the platform broke their laws, they could sue just like the CFTC or even request an arrest and extradition of the alleged perpetrators.
But, in reality, European countries don't often pursue such cases as aggressively as the US. The U.S. government has a well-oiled law enforcement and military machine that it uses to pursue its targets across the globe (sometimes with bullying involved). I'm reminded of a case where a woman was extradited from the Netherlands to the U.S. and sentenced to 3 years for sending a relatively paltry $300 to the terrorist group Al-Shabab.
https://apnews.com/article/africa-netherlands-somalia-al-sha...
And obviously it comes with an unhealthy amount of hubris from watching Donald Trump and Elon Musk in action.
Word of advice - if you don't have tens of millions of dollars to clog the US legal system with procedural nonsense, don't try this at home, just don't.
They would rarely put stuff in writing. I was always told to do stuff. Never in email, never in memo's or any other written form. It was always, "We're going need you to scrub some files from xyz database." or "I need to rewrite this contract and add these additional sections which weren't on the original document." If I needed details, they would put them on a sticky note. I remember they had someone come around and take these notes off of people's desk when the task was completed.
I remember at Christmas one of my uncle's was a stock broker and a big knocker at some financial company. He was asking what I did and where I worked. He started asking more questions and told me I needed to be very careful - what the startup was doing was either really illegal or they were operating in a very gray area. Neither of them will end well for anybody and if the SEC thinks I'm involved in any way of covering up what they were doing? Then I'm in deep shit.
I quit about three weeks later. A year or so after that, the economy collapsed. I found out they were automating robo-signatures for real estate and mortgage companies. They were changing clients contracts from fixed APR's to 3 year ARM's and a bunch of other highly illegal shit. The company went under and despite several local news reports about it, nothing happened. Pretty sure they just got lost in the myriad of other companies going under, people losing everything and the economy collapsing.
It was a good experience for me to understand and see red flags when something doesn't feel right.
I'm sad to say this - but most capitalism operates like this more or less, and capitalism runs the world. There is not enough integrity.
…since a common anti-regulatory strategy is to strangle the funding…
Regulation is just another forum that can be corrupted.
Of course the anti-bodies, aka taxes have to be supressed, otherwise the defenses kick and and a normal society returns.
Does that make sense?
PS: Also I do not intend to debate capitalism vs. communism, I'm trying to convey the idea of "a society driven by profit".
Just a reminder that Madoff ran a ponzi for more than !15 years! to the tune of 20 billion USD and the only ones to go after him where his sons who turned him in to the FBI. Note: the SEC was NOT involved in going after him (they did the opposite: they looked away).
The SEC is a marketing agency that exists to provide a false image of "fair markets". It's not actually a regulatory agency.
While the sons were never formally charged, they were suspected of involvement. One killed himself and the other died of cancer before the investigation was wrapped up.
Close to two dozen people were eventually charged, many went to jail, and JP Morgan paid $2.6 billion to settle their involvement.
There's a lot of unfocused "somebody must hang for this, but we don't know who" anger energy around what happened in 2008. Most of which wasn't criminal at the time or even after, merely poor business decisions. But robo-signing? This was overt fraud, perpetuated against ordinary members of the public, and everyone involved in it should have gone to jail.
I guess this is what happens in remote working. You can't tell people how to break the law over lunch any more.